/v/ - Video Games

I honestly don't know why procedural AI routes aren't a thing in stealth games.

It's such an obvious way of preventing stealth games from just being about memorising patrol routes and introduces the tension of knowing a guard could be coming around a corner at any point.

>>15901770

I think a lot of stealth games are treated by design as this strange hybrid of 'cinematic experience' and puzzle game. Look at the Siren series which many call survival horror just because of its horrific setting and story but that is a stealth-puzzle game before anything else. You sneak around Shibito you cannot combat and interact with certain things to lead to a completion state to continue on the games critical path. Its the same in Metal Gear Solid, its the same in Hitman. I imagine the more random the ai the more it could in fact get easier because of the human element. The more a player can cause ripples in the pond of the game environment in terms of complex, random ai reactions the more you could break it.

Or shit it could just remove things in games now designed to combat the factor of 'pure luck' where you could just saunter through 1 times out of 100 on pure chance.

Its a good idea on paper but since these games are so often small teams on smaller budgets i could see random, adaptive ai bug the fuck out like something out of a bethesda game.

The best option i've seen in practice is Hitman 2016 taking the same map but setting it at a different time of day giving the same npcs different pathing and schedules than what you are used to. Its a shame more games don't utilise this idea like Mooncrash to make a semi random experience.

Nah I get you. Once you learn how to cheese a specific route or manipulate the enemy AI in certain ways even the toughest stealth game can become easy. There's no real way to recapture that thrill of ghosting a level or getting lucky and discovering that the guard always turns left at the end of a hallway rather than right.

Even turning up the difficulty doesn't always help. Now enemies are psychic and can alert their entire squad in a split second if they so much as spot a footprint. It's tricky at first but quickly you learn to cheese them again. This is a reason I disliked playing on hard mode in Ground Zeroes. Now if an enemy spots you the whole base goes on alert even before the enemy can radio in that he saw you.

I guess you can combat it by purposefully going in with subpar weapons and/or restricting items/weapons/moves you go in with. Some of my favorite missions in MGSV were missions where I started with a handful of tranq rounds in my pistol, half a suppressor, and some crappy camo fatigues. Ghosting a mission with those limits felt so satisfying, like I was a real spec ops soldier.

>>15901770

even randomizing guard placement doesn't necessarily help I think. Once you learn to judge how far away you need to be, or how fast you can move before the enemy can detect you, it still makes the game much easier than the devs might have intended. A better solution I think is maybe to randomize paths that you can take to an objective. Most good stealth games give you a variety of ways to get from point A to point B. If on each playthrough these paths change then you're forced to go a different way and have to deal with that on the fly. Maybe one time you find an open sewer and can sneak through it. The next time though this sewer is blocked and you have to go a more dangerous way.

MGSV actually does this a little bit. Enemies wear helmets or gas masks if you used certain weapons. They also put up mines along routes you took in the past.This kind of thing only really works for games that allow you to replay certain missions though.

>>15901740

I find that user made content like FM's in the Thief series helps with the replayability.

>things like a storm -if you ignore that they arent truly random- can shake things up and there feels like more ways to fuck about

Not really. MGSV has braindead AI, a little rain doesn't change anything MGSV is only good if you go guns blazing, it's hardly a stealth game at all. Play something like Pandora Tomorrow or Chaos Theory instead.

>>15901832

I tried a 'self enforced subsistence run' of MGSV a while back. Started a new game and entered every mission i could with nothing. Only what i could procure myself and it was novel at first but in an open world where its not a contained, controlled enviroment of patrolled corridors or 'rooms' be it literal or in gameplay terms of closed areas it still lacked the 'puzzle' element that even entries like Peace Walker had that made it a thing to figure out.

A good Stealth game has 'A to B, heres the routes to do so' and in some games like Dishonoured self restrictions like no powers can be fantastic, granted that game was fucked up in a lot of other ways like one guard dying to a rat made 'high chaos' occur or something but the open stuff of MGSV makes it far, far too easy even if you try to make it hard yourself.

>>15901971

There is another option beyond randomness and thats player selected variables.

For example Dead by Daylight is more Hide and Seek than stealth but its 4 players who have to avoid 1 serial killer while repairing generators to open a gate and escape while the killer has to find them, hit them to wound them, hit them again to down them and hook them and after a minute they are killed. Get as many as you can before they escape.

Theres more to it like health kits, toolboxes and so on but there is an element i think games like this could use and its the 'offering' system.

Basically these are items you earn from gameplay and they are things like "make it a dark night with no moonlight", "thick mist and fog" or "specifically have a match on elm street, haddonfield or the meatpacking plant from SAW".

Bloodborne did something a little similar with its chalice dungeons where the base dungeon was the same but you could add these modifiers so it had alien enemies instead of beast ones, or more poison element stuff for example.

Imagine a game like Hitman where you have a map and its just a mansion in the countryside. Normal mission is get in and get out. But maybe you tired of that and by exploring the map you found collectibles that on replay you can elect as modifiers like "this time its a torrential downpour so there are less guards outside but most of the entrances are locked and movement makes more noise" or "its been snowing and you leave footprints" to stuff like "in 7 minutes the boiler will explode to an undiscovered fault, causing the target to enter their panic room and the mission fails" adding a new distraction to change it up.

Personally i would love to see that sort of thing in lots of games but in stealth modifier unlocks -and a randomiser of them- could make for a lot of neat replay value, on paper at least.

>>15901971

wow ronin flew right under my nose. that looks fun and reminds me of heat signature. another stealth slow mo ninja game but in space. heat signature will get old in a day since for the most part youre going to play it the same way and there are only a few mission types. but its fun until it does get old. while youre learning it and for a while after.

if you do play it, dont be afraid to just beat the game instead of trying to 100% it bceause itll overstay its welcome. i dont have a webm to post though.

Can't recommend Invisible Inc. enough, it's turn based though so if that's not your thing then that's too bad. It's a rogue lite which has the advantage of making each run fresh with random maps + upgrades and agents to unlock. Expert mode on ironman plus is really fun. Video is the last mission which has some sweet music.

>>15902536

>nul-litman

What

>>15902544

hitman 2016, because they didn't the memo that giving your game the same name as the first is a bad idea.

bump

>>15901740

that why hitman 2 has the contract mode. so now you can make a up a run where you kill someone in the level a certain way. or just do other ones people made and if you're real autistic speedrun it to make sure you're always the best

Here's a question to you anons.

Should AI in stealth games have realistic detection range?

I'm asking this because I've seen a lot of people here shit on MGSV's AI for being 'blind' (Even though MGSV's AI has the longest detection range compared to any other MGS game).

But I've seen mods that made the AI realistic, and this resulted in the game being almost impossible. Embed related. Is this the type of AI you'd want in a stealth game?

>>15919159

If the game gives the player necessary tools then yes

Clandestine randomizes guard placement and routes.

>>15919159

It's not just range, but realistic alert times. The start of that video is a good example of unrealistic alert times. Guards in most games are either alert or not at all. A guard who sees the player on a ridge near a base should raise his weapon point at the ridge till he knows it's a human (instead of a random animal) instead of snap shooting instantly

>>15901740

>How do you think devs can combat this?

They could release map editors or similar tools (like contracts mode in HI™AN) and have players make their own levels that can be published if they are finished by creators beforehand.

>>15902708

First one was called Codename 47

they made that mistake with HITMAN™ 2©® not to be confused with Hitman 2: Silent Assassin

>>15919159

I wish AI in TPP wasn't more braindead and less threatining than headless hordes in Survive.

And had level design that doesn't feel like something that was dragged and dropped in sub 15 minutes then author called it a day.

There isn't a single location of significance and with design comparable to Miners residence+underground base or Nicaraguan US Missile base from peace walker.

>>15919236

Echo has AI that actually adapts to the way you play

>>15919124

They had it since absolution, and there's a free online Hitman Roulette for blood money where you can randomize a challenge to kill targets in missions.

>>15919262

yea i know its been since absolution i just meant that its a good idea to extend the gameplay. didn't mean to imply that hitman 2 started it

>>15919252

>Armed man pops up out of cover jogging towards your base at 100m distance

>Guards immediately go alert and open fire

<unrealistic alert time

Nothing on Venom's gear looks Soviet, and at that distance it made perfect sense for the guards to recognize he's a hostile.

>>15919262

>I wish AI in TPP wasn't more braindead and less threatining than headless hordes in Survive

Are you joking? A+ and S+ guards have solid vision, they call HQ on radio to alert the base whenever they see a body or a guard missing and they move a lot more tactically compared to other games.

Meanwhile the AI in previous MGS games is absolutely blind and whenever they see a body or hear something they just stand still and go "huh?", giving you all the time in the world to shoot them.

MGSV's AI could be better, but they're in no way bad. The problem lies with cheesy tactics like rolling and making sure you're 15m away from any guard, or the sneaking suit making your footsteps completely silent.

>>15919283

>The problem lies with cheesy tactics like rolling and making sure you're 15m away from any guard,

You forgot the following cheese tactics

>throwing decoys

>throwing smoke grenades into jeeps

>throwing smoke grenades in front of walker geers

>tranquilizing animals on enemies' path

>throwing knocked out soldiers in front of convoys to drastically slow them down

Monaco does it right.

It's more of a heist game, but levels can be cleared stealthily (levels get increasingly difficult to the point you must be stealthy or get killed fast).

There's so much shit you have to pay attention to. Guards, lasers, cameras, tripwires, dogs, civilians, and a combination of all the above which forces you to stay alert because any slip up/mistake will get you wrecked. There's a lot of replayability in Monaco, shame the multiplayer is dead because I consider this game is a hidden gem.

>>15902417

Invisible Inc is pretty good, though being a randomly-generated jigsaw-style game it does hit some of the problems that >>15901971 talks about. I think it compensates for it by the sheer amount of tension it can generate in gameplay as you have to think very carefully how to get your people out of increasingly dangerous situations, but it would still rub some people the wrong way. I've only beaten the game a couple of times on normal difficulty because it can get a little exhausting after a while.

One of the few stealth games where ghosting is not only the best method, but can be required. You can see enemy patrols from observation, but a guard who has been knocked out and woken back up will break his patrol entirely and begin to randomly comb through the level, introducing unpredictability and therefore a lot more risk.

>>15926442

Big fan of Monaco too, though I'd say it's not completely a stealth game; a lot of its design takes into account that you probably will be caught sooner or later and the genre switches from "stealth game" to "running headless chicken game." Some levels are almost impossible to not get spotted at least once. A fun game though, good music, neat little story, one of the very few games on Steam I went out of my way to get all the cheevos for. I hope the devs come up with a sequel someday.